World of Warcraft Subscriptions Continue to Fall

Written on August 10, 2011 by Japhet Writ

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Blizzard is seeing a decrease in number of its World of Warcraft subscribers despite their fairly new offering.

During their recent earnings announcement, Blizzard claimed that their World of Warcraft subscribers where down again. Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard, told investors that the game is still seeing number of subscribers that are correlated with the release of updates and expansions.

“On the World of Warcraft side, we experienced a slight decrease in subscribership during Q2, closing the quarter at 11.1 million subscribers worldwide. In terms of subscriber growth around the world, what I would say is what we have seen is that subscribership tends to be seasonal and driven by content updates and so as we are heading further away from an expansion launch, it’s normal to seasoned declines where the team is currently working on our largest content update since Cataclysm and that will hit later this year.”

In addition to this, the team is working on the next content update that is said to include “major raid and dungeon content.”

“The World of Warcraft development team is also working on the next content update, which will include major new raid and dungeon content. We believe that this new end game content will keep the game fresh for current players and provide compelling reasons for laps players to come back.”

Blizzard recently announced as well that players can play WoW until level 20 free. However, this offering is not seeing an increase in subscribers yet. But despite that, the firm is getting ready for a serious competition with Bioware, as the latter gears up for the holiday launch of Old Republic.

The game dev company was spotted to register trademarks for Mists of Pandaria which is believed to be World of Warcraft’s next content update. And while no exact date was given on when it will roll out, Mike Morhaime said that it will be launched sometime this year.